Video store: “Umm yeah, we just received your requested movie at Anytown’s Movie Shack, come pick it up soon!”
Competing against the Blockbusters and the Hollywood Videos of the world is tough for mom-and-pop video stores. People don’t even need to rent DVDs from local stores, they can download it from the internet, get them mailed to them, or order them through their cable service or sattilite dish. However, in order to help keep the customers they have (while turning a profit), video store owners have started to re-rent Netflix movies to customers instead of paying the $20 dollars or more that an obscure title might cost.
Charging $4.50-per-disc, one Massachusetts store owner stated that “it’s nice to be able to offer the latest foreign title that no one has heard of… [as long as I can find it on Netflix!].” Renting out only about a dozen Netflix discs a month saves the owner more than $2,000 in inventory costs. With Blu-ray discs coming (which cost significantly more than DVDs), expect this to occur more.
Netflix doesn’t like the practice for obvious reasons, and claim that the Netflix customer agreement states that DVDs rented through Netflix are not to be rented, copied, or loaned to others. Shipping nearly 2 million DVDs daily makes tracking any particular patterns very difficult, and Netflix really can’t do much to change things.
It’s not just video stores that have gotten into the act. The Sanborton Public LIbrary in Sanborton, New Hampshire essentially opened up a $16.99 three-disc-at-a-time account to the general public. An article in the local paper invited residents to sign out DVDs using the library’s own Netflix account. Now that is slick! We are big fans of Netflix at ITR, and love receiving quality cinema like “Boat Trip” and “Euro Trip” (basically anything related to trips). Okay, that’s all a lie. The article does make us consider renting out the movies we borrow, since others try to “persuade” us to rent certain movies before inevitably asking to borrow it.
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